RhAssets

Every material and sound clip Railhead: Dust Sea touches, resolved through a static identity literal.

local Assets = require("RhAssets")

Assets.material("rh_barrel")   -- an AssetRef<material>
Assets.clip("fire")            -- an AssetRef<soundClip>

Why this exists

A computed reference — asset.ref(someVariable) — cannot be pinned at publish time. The reference is invisible to the world's dependency graph, and there is no guarantee it resolves once the world is installed somewhere else, so the publish gate refuses it.

That is a real constraint, not a formality: RhFx.setModel and RhProps.part both take a material name as an argument, and RhAudio.play takes a cue name. Those are exactly the call shapes that produce a computed ref.

So the whole set is spelled out here once, each as a literal, and everything else looks up by short key. The registry is the single place that knows an asset's full identity; the rest of the game says "rh_barrel" and "fire".

Lazy on purpose

Both tables fill on first use rather than at module load. Requiring this module early — from a component's awake, before the asset index has finished registering the world's own content — would otherwise fail to resolve. An unknown key warns and returns nil instead of raising, so a typo in an effect shows up as one missing material rather than a dead frame.

Adding an asset

Add the literal to the matching builder (buildMaterials or buildClips). For a sound cue, add it to RhAudio.CUES and give it a generator there too — the bake walks that table and nothing else.